MPs return to House of Commons for first time in five months
Global News
The session opens today with the election of a new Speaker, followed by a speech from the throne delivered by Governor General Mary Simon in the Senate on Tuesday.
It’s a new Parliament that looks almost identical to the old one, after an election Sept. 20 that saw only a handful of seats change hands and gave Justin Trudeau‘s Liberals their second consecutive minority.
And it’s facing many of the same issues: the ongoing battle against COVID-19, rebuilding the battered economy, climate change, Indigenous reconciliation.
It’s likely to face a similar partisan divide as well, with the Conservatives putting up stiff opposition to most Liberal initiatives, forcing the government to rely primarily on the NDP and occasionally the Bloc Quebecois to pass legislation and survive confidence votes.
The session opens today with the election of a new Speaker, followed by a speech from the throne delivered by Governor General Mary Simon in the Senate on Tuesday.
Liberal MP Anthony Rota, Speaker throughout the last session, is widely expected to win re-election after deftly managing to steer the Commons through the first three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic with a new hybrid format that gave MPs the option of participating virtually in proceedings.
But Speaker elections, in which MPs cast ranked ballots, can be unpredictable. Rota is up against three Conservative MPs — Marc Dalton, Chris d’Entremont and Joel Godin — as well as fellow Liberal MP Alexandra Mendes and New Democrat Carol Hughes, both of whom served as deputy speakers in the last session.
Veteran Green MP Elizabeth May is also in the running but she said in an interview Sunday she actually believes Rota deserves to be re-elected. As a candidate, however she gets to make a five-minute speech, which she intends to use to draw attention to what she considers a major error by various Speakers over the past 40 years: allowing party whips to dictate who gets to speak in the Commons, surrendering the Speaker’s authority to choose whom to recognize.
Only MPs who are in the House will be able to vote for the Speaker.
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